Postdoc: Multimodal AI for Early Respiratory Health Screening

The University of Sheffield; Sheffield; On-site; GBP 39,000 - 42,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid/ Flexible working

Annual leave and pension

Staff discounts

Career development

Job summary

The University of Sheffield is seeking a postdoctoral research associate to lead ML research on acoustic foundation models for respiratory health within LungSight, a multi-university project.

You will work with large-scale real-world speech, breathing and cough data, developing self-supervised learning approaches and contributing to clinically informed biomarkers, with opportunities for publications and stakeholder engagement.

Qualifications

• Strong research experience in machine learning or deep learning.
• Experience in Python using PyTorch.
• Research in speech, audio, acoustic signal processing.
• Knowledge of self-supervised learning or foundation models.
• Ability to design rigorous experiments and evaluate robustness.
• Publications or technical reports demonstrating communication of research.
• Ability to work independently within a multidisciplinary team.
• Strong organisational skills for reproducible code and data.
• Experience with multimodal machine learning or healthcare AI.
• Desirable: experience with sensitive data and NHS collaboration.

Responsibilities

• Develop and evaluate acoustic foundation models for respiratory health using audio data.
• Pre-process and analyse large-scale real-world audio datasets.
• Explore self-supervised learning and Transformer architectures for robust representations.
• Fine-tune models on labelled datasets and assess clinical utility.
• Investigate confounding factors and bias; improve reliability of models.
• Collaborate with Southampton PDRA on feature engineering and integration.
• Develop multimodal approaches combining audio, visual and clinical data.
• Collaborate with LungSight partners and participate in meetings.
• Publish high-quality research and contribute to supervision.
• Carry out other duties as required.

Skills

Machine learning

Python (PyTorch)

Speech processing

Representation learning

Self-supervised learning

Transformer architectures

Experiment design

Research publications

Independent work

Tools

PyTorch

Job description

The University of Sheffield is seeking a postdoctoral research associate to lead ML research on acoustic foundation models for respiratory health within LungSight, a multi-university project.

You will work with large-scale real-world speech, breathing and cough data, developing self-supervised learning approaches and contributing to clinically informed biomarkers, with opportunities for publications and stakeholder engagement.